Introduction

In the absence of a [Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae] or [Perseus Project]-style [collection of texts]
for Sanskrit
or the other languages of classical Indian studies, this
page will begin an attempt to bring together in one location
links to machine-readable files of texts in Indic languages,
wherever they may be.

The organizing principles of this page are still far from
clear! One point does stand out, however. In the longer run,
all the texts below need to be encoded according to
the guidelines of the [Text Encoding Intitiative]. See Peter
Schreiner's encoding of the [Buddhacarita] for an
important experimental example of applying the TEI
guidelines to a Sanskrit text.

If you have a classical Indian text to contribute, or if you
know of WWW links to texts which are not shown here, I would
be grateful if you would [
send me a note] with the information. Thank you.

A discussion of copyright in the
INDOLOGY
forum during late 1996 raised some interesting
issues with regard to rights and privileges in the use of
electronic texts. One of our members, Dr. Fco. Javier
Martinez Garcia, kindly drew attention to the following two
WEB sites, to which you are recommended for more information
about copyright issues.

The US Copyright Office has published "Project Looking Forward: Final Report, Sketching the Future of Copyright in a Networked World" by College of William and Mary
Law Professor Trotter Hardy, who conducted the project on contract with the Copyright Office during the latter half of 1996. It is available online (above link) and may be ordered in
paper from the Government Printing Office for $23, stock number S/N 030-002-00191-8, from mid-August 1998.

The CTS e-texts are digital text files of
primary tantric sources, presented solely for
the purpose of teaching, research or private
study.

CTS e-texts are prefaced with front matter
referring to the sources used, crediting the
author/editor, and recording date and version of
input. They are presented as plain Unicode text
with no markup, typographic embellishment,
annotations or critical apparatus.

This repository of texts is an effort to collect,
edit, and make available important and often rare
Sanskrit and Bengali texts that belong to the
Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. It is for the use of
any and all scholars of Sanskrit, Bengali, and the
Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. It will eventually
contain carefully edited and proofread editions of
the whole corpus of Caitanya Vaisnava texts and many
other important Sanskrit texts from other traditions
and fields of study. The entire Gaudiya Grantha
Mandira corpus of texts will eventually be made
available on CD for a nominal fee.

Includes the Brahmapurana transcription by
Peter Schreiner and Renata Shnen-Thieme. As well as
being an important research resource, this is a
model of good practice in the creation of electronic
texts.

A large collection (almost 30 megabytes) of Sanskrit
texts in machine-readable form. Includes independent
versions of the Rigveda, Mahabharata, and Ramayana,
as well as puranas, medical texts, upanishads,
darshana texts, etc.

Notices of several projects and people involved in
Indo-european studies, as well as lists of texts in
Sanskrit and other languages which have been put
into machine-readable format. Many Indic texts are
publicly accessible for searching and analysis via
the innovative [WordCruncher Server].

Rome University "La Sapienza" Sanskrit
Text Archive. Unfortunately, this website has gone
away (2012). You can travel back in time to see
what used to be there, by consulting the WayBack
Machine, that offers snapshots of the past.

This is a database version of the Pali Canon (in
Pali) based on the digitised text prepared by
the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project. The advantage
of using this version of the Pali canon is that
it makes it easy to search for individual words
across all 20,946 pages at once and view the
contexts in which they appear.

In 2003, the University of the West, Los
Angeles, under the generous sponsorship of Most
Venerable Master Hsing Yun and guided by the
initiative of Prof. Lewis Lancaster, began the
Sanskrit Buddhist Canon Project (SBCP). The
initial grant, covering the input of 50 Mahayana
sutras, was completed in 2004.

Our second phase, in 2005, covers the input of
about 100 Shastra titles. The input of Shastras
comprising the works of Acarya Nagarjuna, Arya
Deva, Asanga, and Vasubandhu has already
commenced, and will be completed by the end of
2006-7.

`Bussei Electronic Text Library' was established by the
students of the Young Buddhist Association of the
University of Tokyo (Bussei) with the aim to share the
e-texts of Indology and publications for scholarly
purposes.

As of May 2012, the archive contains downloadable
machine-readable files of the following texts:

Other e-text projects, including digital repositories

Catalogue of the "GRETIL e-library". Electronic
documents of the "Göttingen Register of Electronic
Texts in Indian Languages" (GRETIL) at
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek
Göttingen. A collection of e-documents (books,
articles) on Indological subjects and related
fields, including writings relevant to the history
of Indology.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that
was founded to build an Internet library, with the
purpose of offering permanent access for
researchers, historians, and scholars to historical
collections that exist in digital format.

The mission is to create a portal for the Digital
Library of India which will foster creativity and
free access to all human knowledge. As a first step
in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create
the Digital Library with a free-to-read, searchable
collection of one million books, predominantly in
Indian languages, available to everyone over the
Internet. This portal will also become an aggregator
of all the knowledge and digital contents created by
other digital library initiatives in India.

The Digital Himalaya project was conceived of by
Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr. Mark Turin as a
strategy for archiving and making available valuable
ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) is a
publisher of websites, information services, and
networking facilities relating to the Tibetan
plateau and southern Himalayan regions. THL promotes
the integration of knowledge and community across
the divides of academic disciplines, the historical
and the contemporary, the religious...

Digital Library: to preserve rare Sanskrit
manuscripts and texts in multiple digital formats,
and make them accessible for study worldwide through
our website. The aim is to secure for future
generations first the core texts of Kashmir
Shaivism, and then in ever widening circles to
secure those texts that form the streams or
environment from which Kashmir Shaivism grew and was
synthesized. These include the Kaula-Trika,
Saiva-Siddhanta, Pancaratra, and Natha Yoga schools.

A collection of Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and other
Indic texts in transliteration and also as
PostScript files displaying Devanagari font (best
with GhostView). Includes several stotras,
upanisads, Brahmasutra extracts, subhasitas, etc.

This online text of the Rigveda derives from the
highly important Rig Veda: a Metrically
Restored Text, by Barend A. van Nooten and
Gary B. Holland, published in 1994 by Harvard
University Press; van Nooten and Holland's
edition, as the first attempt to present the
poems in their entirety in the poetic form in
which they were composed, constituted a
watershed in Rigvedic scholarship, but it has
been out of print for several years.

To protect, preserve, and disseminate the
ancient and contemporary Jain literature, the
Education Committee of Federation of JAINA,
North America, has launched a JAINA eLibrary
project. Under this project the Jain literature
will be converted electronically into eBooks
(pdf files) and made available via the website
to the readers who are interested in Jain
religion and its philosophy. ... The eLibrary
contains Shvetämbar Ägams, Digambar Shästras,
Four Anuyogas, Commentary literature, Präkrit
& Sanskrit literature and ancient and modern
literature representing all aspects of Jainism.
...

Individual texts presented by scholars

[Venisamhara by Bhattanarayana] XML file
encoded using TEI guidelines by Yves Codet. Includes
accented scholarly transliteration and Devanagari,
using Unicode. A model of how to proceed with e-texts.

PDF file. The Nagari (critical) text of the
Dharmacauryarasayana, as printed in the Milano
edition, 2001. The publisher, Edizioni Ariele, sends
his blessings for putting this file online in
Indology. Presented by Alex Passi.

Texts encoded in XML (non-TEI) and presented in html with
xhtml1-transitional.dtd. The e-texts note that they are not
proofread. Includes a cumulative pāda index of Sanskrit Śaiva
verses, Gaṇapatitattva, Mahājñāna, Tattvajñāna,
Vṛhaspatitattva, and Saṅ Hyaṅ Kamahāyānikan.

The original website disappeared between 2010 and 2012.
The above link is retrieved from The WayBackMachine.

Early this year a group of Tamil volunteers coming
from four corners of the world joined together to
launch an open, world-wide initiative called Project
Madurai. This project is devoted to preparing
electronic texts of Tamil literary works, and
archiving them in public-access websites and
distributing them free on the internet. The Project
Madurai web site gives information on e-texts
already released (such as the thirukkuRaL of
thiruvaLLuvar), e-texts in preparation, target
works, volunteers involved, etc.